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aldonius

177 karma · joined May 7, 2020

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aldonius··on MCP was always a bad idea?
If your customers are normal people who use ChatGPT in the browser, they want ChatGPT Apps, which are based on MCP.
aldonius··on Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card
Turns out Adelaide too, and Canberra.

Meanwhile Hobart and Darwin are free PT right now.

aldonius··on Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card
Yep, and it's increasingly common around the world. In Australia, it's also fully rolled out in Brisbane and I believe it's just about finished being rolled out in Melbourne too.
aldonius··on Turns are Better than Radians (2022)
Binary fractions of a turn are also a nice intuition pump for two's complement in general.

Let's keep it simple and use just 8 bits. 0° is 0x00, 180° is 0x80, and 255/256ths of 360° is 0xFF. And if we wanted to use signed integers, then 0x80 through 0xFF - the high-bit half of the range - now represent the negative quadrants just as they represent negative integers.

aldonius··on Cerebras CS-4
Yeah, but there's certainly a part of the curve where price drops by X OOMs and demand increases by much more than X OOMs. (Presumably some of that is substitution and some of that is new use cases.)
aldonius··on Two wheels, a few tradeoffs, and gas prices
You've touched on a key point: in a city, space is at a premium, so taking up a lot of it for yourself _really is_ luxury consumption.
aldonius··on Humans haven't stopped evolving
Mmm, yes, some real parallels between Blindsight's conception of consciousness and LLM chain-of-thought reasoning.
aldonius··on Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
> When emails overwhelmed me, I asked a thoughtful user who emailed frequently and seemed to know as much about the product as I did if he’d help answer the emails, so I paid him to do that. And he did a great job, especially in terms of directly solving user problems.

Hey, I got promoted from customer to Customer Support at _my_ $dayjob!

Let's review some common areas.

- Pricing: everyone is always looking to get a better deal. That's their right but I'm unlikely to give one. Saying no here is just another (emotional) cost of doing business.

- Bug reports: broad agree on all four points but not necessarily the conclusion. Users who are willing to go down the debugging rabbit hole with me are golden.

- Pathological customers: I like to call them "frequent flyers". Enough said.

- Feature requests: we're not necessarily as "opinionated" so we rarely give a hard no, but this is why we have a "feedback board with upvotes" approach.

- General usage questions: I have an attitude of fresh eyes often being the best eyes for usability testing. If it's not obvious, what can we do to make it so? We also use Intercom Fin to handle a lot of these level-0-support questions though.

aldonius··on The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
Oracle's not a good comparison though, because it's getting valued as an AI compute provider as well as for its traditional business. At the end of 2021 Oracle's stock was about $100 (all-time-high in nominal terms at the time), its current ATH was October last year at $292.
aldonius··on Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning
I guess we can imagine a pure reasoning model (if that's even the right word any more) with almost zero world-knowledge. How does it know what to look for? How does it do any meaningful communication at all?

So I think it's useful to have an imprecise-but-fairly-accurate set of world knowledge as part of an otherwise reasoning-heavy model. It's a cache.

And if the it's an LLM, or something like that, I think it basically has to have world-knowledge built in, because what is natural language if not communication about the world?

aldonius··on Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional
Either way, it's bizarre that blame-assignation is anything other than defaults-to-owner.
aldonius··on A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
Interesting idea and I do agree that contiguous is OK but total is not.

I think I'd suggest a more generous Senate term limit. Three terms (18 years) would allow for someone to see out a complete Presidential super-cycle, for example.

The word Senate is etymologically related to "senior", it's a place where you _want_ people to be able to develop a lot of institutional experience.

aldonius··on I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk
I thought Anthropic's take on #2 was they don't think the model's good enough yet?
aldonius··on Banned in California
I mean, that's pretty normal right. The product starts out as a bit niche and expensive, and then as it scales in manufactured volume, variants & competitors become available at lower price points.
aldonius··on Openclaw on Oracle's Free Tier: Always-On AI for $0/Month
Given RAM shortages, I really have to wonder how long that 24GB RAM offer is sticking around...
aldonius··on Radicle: The Sovereign Forge
Thanks for clarifying.

Just for reference, usually folks in this situation use postfix initials rather than prefix (like how blockquotes are cited).

- J.S.

aldonius··on Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15
I drive a 20-year-old Civic.

On a trip about 18 months ago I had some Kia soft-roader hire car. I bloody hated the lane keeping (unfamiliar narrow twisty roads are bad enough without the car tugging on the steering wheel).

Conversely the auto-distance thing with cruise control is fantastic - it makes CC usable at way higher traffic densities.

aldonius··on I've been writing ring buffers wrong all these years (2016)
It's a somewhat different kind of ring buffer, because there's just one index, but I used it in my signal processing class for a finite-impulse-response filter.

Choose N to be a power of two >= the length of your filter.

Increment index i mod N, write the sample at buffer position x[i], output sum of x[i-k mod N] * a[k] where a[k] are your filter coefficients, repeat with next sample at next time step.

aldonius··on Iowa City made its buses free. Traffic cleared, and so did the air
In Brisbane I think our ticketing system cost overhead is maybe 10%?

The cost of the programme rolling out new ticketing infra (the first major ticketing system upgrade in ~15 years since we first got integrated ticketing, going from a stored-value smart card to also being able to tap your credit card) is roughly the same amount of money as the annual revenue from fares.

aldonius··on Subway Builder: A realistic subway simulation game
It's coming to Steam in a few months, apparently.
aldonius··on Microsoft doubles down on small modular reactors and fusion energy
Yes, and if they want to net-zero all their energy, not just their electricity, they will need to do some mix of:

1. electrify those applications currently served by gas 2. import or manufacture carbon-neutral synthetic gas 3. buy a heck of a lot of offsets

aldonius··on Prime Number Grid
You'll find that when the number of columns is a multiple of 6 you'll get obvious columns in the dots, and if it's +1 or -1 modulo 6 the columns become diagonal stripes (the process sort of continues for ±2 and at ±3 it's pretty broken down).

It's a fairly straightforward number theory result that every prime > 3 is congruent to ±1 modulo 6 so that's probably what you're seeing. (Can't be +2 or +4 because that's divisible by 2, can't be +3 because that's divisible by 3, leaving +1 and +5 aka -1.)

aldonius··on AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers
I'll put in a good word for a chatbot hooked up to the documentation (e.g. at $dayjob we use Intercom Fin) acting as level 0.5 support.

At $dayjob our customers are nontechnical so they don't always know what to search for, so the LLM/RAG approach can be quite handy.

It answers about 2/3 of incoming questions, can escalate to the humans as needed, and scales great.

aldonius··on Obsidian Bases
Surely that's plugin-modifiable in Obsidian.
aldonius··on Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment?
I'd suggest high local wealth and economic productivity tend to correlate strongly with increased housing costs.

People move there for the jobs, and the ones who do have jobs tend to have relatively well paying ones, so can pay more for housing. But the ones who don't have a well paying job are in trouble...

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-housing-shortages-cause...

aldonius··on I prefer human-readable file formats
I suppose with SQLite files, you could at least in theory diff their SQL-dump representations, though you'd presumably want a way to canonicalise said representation. In a way I suppose each (VCS) commit is a bit like a database migration.
aldonius··on SQLite Date and Time Functions (2007)
There's just enough there to be able to do "+1 month" calculations and similar, which is really helpful for generating dates in a range.
aldonius··on Apple has announced its final version of macOS for Intel
> will get full access to all the new features

Plenty of newer image processing and AI features are M-series only.

aldonius··on Is TfL losing the battle against heat on the Victoria line?
With frequent trains and close stop spacing you've plausibly got a situation where each train is entering and leaving each station at about the same time? So skip-stop might not save much acceleration/braking.
aldonius··on A faster way to copy SQLite databases between computers
DuckDB can read and write both SQLite and Parquet.
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